In Britain, eponymous lifestyle branding as we know it started in the late 1960s, with two fascinating families - the Conrans and the Ashleys - who in increasingly brilliant settings and catalogues sold rather different visions of what the new ideal upper-middle-y life looked like.
Peter YorkAll brands, whether high-ticket luxury ones such as Cartier or Rolls-Royce or 'masstige' ones with luxe-y overtones but altogether more affordable, all want to grow. Even brands that may have started in a modestly niche design and lifestyle fashion can find themselves under pressure to go global or to sell out at the top.
Peter YorkThe library was one more essential in the parade of rooms in a big 18th-century house - and part of the required kit ever afterwards. The important thing was to have the books, not actually read them.
Peter YorkThere is an interior style we intellectuals and design policy wonks know as Haut Euro Pooftastic, which really takes the biscuit.
Peter YorkWhen you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels.
Peter York